Saturday, May 30, 2015

Thirst for Conquest

May
28, 2015, was the 175th anniversary of the Indian Removal Act. On
that day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the bill that required the U.
S. Army to evict southeastern Native tribes, including my Cherokee tribe, from
their native lands and send them to Oklahoma. Many people think of this as a
land grab; that is, the federal government wanted Native land and whatever
resources (such as the Dahlonega gold mines) it might possess. That is, the
motivation was primarily economic. However, as I will explain, this does not
seem to be the case. I believe that the primary, if unrecognized, motivation
was the thirst for conquest.

My
first piece of evidence for this comes from the Indian Removal of the 1830s.
The federal government had to spend a lot more money to send the Cherokees and
other tribes on forced marches than they could possibly have recovered,
especially since most of the land and its wealth went to the states, such as
Georgia, rather than into federal coffers. The federal government had to expend
army resources to drive the tribes westward, and had to provide Natives with
food and shelter (both barely adequate, but still costly on the whole) during
the journey. Then, when the Native tribes got to Indian Territory, the
government had to maintain forts to protect the Cherokees and other relocated
tribes from attacks by the tribes who originally lived in the region. Ft.Gibson, in northeastern Oklahoma, was
built in 1824 but primarily served to protect the Cherokees after the Trail of
Tears after 1839. Ft. Washita, Oklahoma, was built in 1842 for the express purpose of protecting Chickasaws and Choctaws
from the indigenous tribes in southern Oklahoma.

So the federal government
spent a lot of resources to move and then protect the southeastern tribes. It
seems unlikely that the federal government came out economically ahead by this.
Therefore the Indian Removal was not merely, to use a term from Steve Inskeep’snew book,
a land grab.

My
second piece of evidence to demonstrate that the federal government wanted to
conquer Native tribes rather than to just get their land comes from the story
of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. The army had already taken his tribe’s land, and he and the remnant of his
tribe was fleeing to Canada. When they were only forty miles from Canada, the
federal army caught them in 1877 and sent them as prisoners to various
reservation localities. If the only motive was to get their land, then the
federal government would have let them flee U.S. territory. All the rest was
unnecessary expense intended only to crush the Nez Perce.

In
prehistoric times, the thirst for conquest may have been a profitable
adaptation. When one tribe fought another, they did not merely desire the other
tribe’s land or resources, but experienced a bloodlust, fully experiencing the
other tribe as evil, feeling a desire to make the other tribe suffer before
being slaughtered. That is, natural selection may have favored both the
behaviors and the feelings of conquest and annihilation. The white American
government did not just want Native American land, but wanted to drive Native
Americans to extinction or at least to put them somewhere where they could be
forgotten.

Another
set of behaviors and feelings that may have been profitable to prehistoric
humans is to depict the enemy tribe as not merely evil but powerfully evil—that
is, to believe and feel that the enemy has supernatural force. A tribe that
believes its enemies to be supernaturally evil will fight harder than a tribe
that considers its enemies to be merely humans worthy of annihilation.
Unfortunately, while the thirst for enemy annihilation is pretty much a thing
of the past in America, the belief that one’s enemies are supernaturally
powerful is not.

There
are two recent examples of this.

In
2012, according to theHouston Chronicle, Lubbock County (Texas) judge Tom Head
said regarding President Barack Obama, “He’s going to
try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations),
and what is going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking the worst. Civil
unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few
riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms
and get rid of the guy…Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public
decides to do that? He’s going to send inU.N.troops.
I don’t want ‘em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their
armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’.”

In 2015, Texas governor Greg Abbott feared that President Obama
was planning a military takeover of Texas. Not satisfied with words, Abbott
ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor a U.S. Navy Seal training operation.

In both of these instances, the Texas officials accused President
Obama of planning to do things that are very nearly physically impossible. By
what possible set of causal factors could President Obama order United Nations
troops into Texas? By what possible set of causal factors could President Obama
bring about a military takeover of Texas? In both cases, the Texas officials
seemed to be giving Obama a kind of infernal, supernatural power. To them, he
is not merely a political opponent but the manifestation of spiritual evil.
(Strangely enough, a little over a week later, Governor Abbott begged this same
President Obama for federal assistance to recover from Texas flash floods.)

The tribes who had a desire to annihilate enemy tribes, and the
desire to depict one’s enemies as supernaturally evil, prevailed in the
prehistoric struggle for existence. We are their descendants. And their
behaviors and feelings live on in us, as manifested in recent history and in
current events.

1 comment:

The whole story is essentially a matter of fact is war for land and resources, and even worse now, just for the views and contradictions and it is scary, I hope in future it will ends! You want to find help with research papers they could help http://mypaperhelper.com

Honest Ab

Honest Ab is Stan Rice, a botanist who studied a little weed with heart-shaped leaves, Abutilon theophrasti (Ab). He started this blog in 2009, 200 years after the births of Darwin and Honest Abe. Click image for his web page.